The District Commissioner changed instantaneously. The resolute
administrator in him gave way to the student of primitive customs.... As
he walked back to the court he thought about [the book he planned to
write]. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man
who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting
reading. One could write almost a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a
whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much
else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had
already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The
Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

These famous closing lines of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall
Apart (1958, hereafter TFA) represent a dramatic shift of perspective,
whereby the protagonist's life story, which has been the subject of
the previous twenty four chapters, is unceremoniously condensed into a
brief anecdote in a foreign text: we are thrust from what is figured as
an intimate, insider's view of Igbo life to a jarringly alien one.
The outsider's proposed ethnography of the region's
purportedly primitive tribes exemplifies a tradition of colonial
discourse that Achebe powerfully counters in TFA. (1) Okonkwo's
tragic death--prefiguring for the reader the demise of the clan's
traditional ways--serves the government anthropologist merely as raw
material to appropriate and possibly turn to a profit. (2) Not only is
the prominent Okonkwo stripped of his individual identity as he is
transformed into a nameless African in a Western text, but the
particularities of the sophisticated Igbo culture, which the novel has
taken pains to elaborate, are also erased as they are lumped together in
the essentialist category of primitive tribes. Moreover, though the
Commissioner has shown himself to be a poor reader of native customs and
beliefs, lacking both the intellectual curiosity and the humility that
are requisite to understanding another culture, he nonetheless passes as
an African authority in the West. Achebe's narrative works to
redress the reductive and distorted representation of traditional
African cultures emblematized by the Commissioner's text.

The reference to the colonial text within the novel may be taken as
an embedded reference to the extra-textual politics of representation in
which the novel participates. Achebe reports that it was his anger at
what he took to be the caricatures of Nigerians in Joyce Cary's
novel Mr. Johnson that initially inspired him to write a
counter-narrative, sympathetic to the indigenous perspective (Flowers
1989, 4). By the author's account, the novel is meant at once to
"write back" to the Western canon, (3) correcting erroneous
representations of Africa and Africans, and to restore to his people an
awareness of the dignity and humanity of precolonial Africa--reminding
them "what they lost" through colonization (Achebe 1973, 8).
Published two years before Nigeria gained independence from Great
Britain, TFA aims to wrest from the colonial metropole control over the
representation of African lives, staking a claim to the right to
self-representation.

While raising issues of authority and authorship, at the same time,
the District Commissioner's indisputably alien perspective at the
novel's end functions to reinforce the impression of the foregoing
narrative's ostensible authenticity: as Neil ten Kortenaar
perceptively argues, Achebe's "appeal to an obviously false
authority deploys irony to establish Achebe's own credentials as a
historian of Igboland" (2003, 124). Against the egregiously
misinformed interpretation of an outsider, the rest of the novel is
fashioned as a view "from the inside," as the author himself
has described it (Flowers 1989, 4). With such remarks, Achebe has
contributed to the aura of authenticity that surrounds his book,
positioning himself as a kind of native anthropologist, who represents
from within the life of the fictionalized Eastern Nigerian village,
Umuofia (based on the author's native Ogidi).

Selling millions of copies and taught not only in literature
classrooms, but in anthropology, comparative religion, and African
Studies courses as well, TFA is widely appreciated for its richly
detailed, "inside-perspective" of a traditional West African culture. (4) Indeed, the novel has frequently been deemed
"ethnographic" for its vivid representation of the customs,
ceremonies, and beliefs of the Igbo people. An early review captures
this sense of confidence in the author's credentials as an
ethnographic reporter: "No European ethnologist could so intimately
present this medley of mores of the Ibo tribe, so detail the intricate
formalities of the clan." (5) In 1980, critic David Carroll presents what by then is a received view, when he writes, "With
great skill Achebe ... combines the role of novelist and anthropologist,
synthesizing a new kind of fiction. This is where his essential genius
lies" (1980, 183). In 1991, the MLA's Approaches to Teaching
Achebe's Things Fall Apart, based on a survey of several hundred
teachers of African literature in the U.S., Africa, and Europe, lists
among the principal reasons for teaching this novel the perception that
it offers "an unusual opportunity to discover the foreign from
within": "Readers everywhere may enter Achebe's Igbo
worldview and see past and present African experiences from an
indigenous perspective" (Lindfors 1991, 15,2). (6) Finally, in
another pedagogical volume, Understanding Things Fall Apart, Kalu Ogbaa
informs teachers and students that Achebe's novel may be regarded
as "an authentic information source on the nineteenth-century Igbo
and their neighbors" (1999, xvii).

As a literary critic (in the American academy) and not an
anthropologist, I have no intention of questioning the accuracy of
Achebe's cultural portrait of the Igbo, which seems deserving of
its reputation as authoritative.7 What I do want to question is this
persistent rhetoric of authenticity, intimacy, and (to coin a clumsy
word) insiderness which pervades discussions of Achebe's text.
Further, I want to challenge the pervasive ethnographic or
anthropological mode of reading Achebe's novel, which I take as
paradigmatic of a common approach to African literature, and to ethnic
literatures more generally, at least in the West. (8)

As Keith Booker points out, "anthropological readings ... have
sometimes prevented African novels from receiving serious critical
attention as literature rather than simply as documentation of cultural
practices." (9) The naive ethnographic or anthropological reading
treats a novel like TFA as though it transparently represents the world
of another culture, ignoring the aesthetic dimensions of the
representation. Ato Quayson suggests that the tendency to read
Achebe's novels as though they unproblematically represent historic
and cultural reality is not limited to critics unfamiliar with the
African context: West African critic Emmanuel Obiechina "duplicates
this tendency from an insider's perspective," reading TFA
"as reflective or mimetic of traditional beliefs and practices in
an almost unmediated way" (Quayson 2003, 225). (10) (While I agree
with the thrust of Quayson's critique, I will quarrel with his
reification of the categories of insider and outsider shortly.) It is
not merely that such readings give short shrift to the literary
dimensions of this fiction, but in reading fiction like ethnography,
some critics operate from the false assumption that ethnographic texts
themselves are transparent. (11) In another context, Elizabeth Fernea
defines the "ethnographic novel" as one "written by an
artist from within the culture," which presents an
"authentic" representation of that culture (1989, 154, 153).
Leaving aside the objection that "auto-ethnographic" might be
a more fitting term here, Fernea's definition highlights a common
assumption of such readings: the writer's "insider"
status rather circularly verifies the "authenticity" of the
representation.

This article seeks to complicate the construction of postcolonial
writers like Achebe as cultural insiders. My analysis demonstrates that
neither the author nor the narrative voice of TFA can be aligned simply
with a monological African (or even West African, Nigerian, or
nineteenth-century Igbo) perspective, despite the persistent critical
tendency to do so. Raised by Christian evangelists in a small village in
Eastern Nigeria, Achebe has written eloquently about his childhood
alienation from his family's ancestral traditions. I show that
Achebe's perspective at the "cultural crossroads" (his
phrase) is manifest in the narrative voice of TFA, which moves along a
continuum of proximity and distance in relation to the culture it
sympathetically describes. In this way, Achebe's position vis-a-vis
the Igbo does exemplify many of the dilemmas of ethnographic
observation--if we understand the relationship between the observer and
the observed to be more complicated, and sometimes fraught, than most
anthropological readings of the novel assume. To uncover the
complexities in the narrative voice, I argue, we need to read the novel
not naively as providing a clear window onto an alien culture--in
contrast with the presumably distorted vision of colonial writers like
Joyce Cary--but meta-ethnographically, in a way that attends to the
complexity inherent in any ethnographic situation. (12) Such a reading
restores Achebe's text to the realm of the literary, by encouraging
subtle attention to the narrative's achievements as fiction, rather
than as cultural documentation.

A Voice from the Inside

Lauding Achebe's judicious and multifaceted representation of
the Igbo in TFA, David Carroll writes, "It was an achievement of
detachment, irony and fairness, demonstrating in the writing those
qualities he admires in his own people" (1980, 29). But in what
sense are the turn-of-the-century Igbo represented in the novel the
author's "own people"? The formulation simplifies the
writer's subject position, while ignoring the heterogeneity of the
Igbo, as of all cultures. Achebe's divided identity as a colonial
subject is emblematized by his christened name, Albert Chinualumogu, a
tribute on the one hand to Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert,
and on the other, to the writer's African heritage; at University,
he dropped the former and cropped the latter name, refashioning his
identity in a way that could be read as simultaneously indigenizing (by
effacing the colonial marker) and modernizing (in his words, making the
name "more businesslike") (Achebe 1975, 118). Achebe explains
that he was born at the "crossroads of cultures": "On one
arm of the cross, we sang hymns and read the Bible night and day. On the
other, my father's brother and his family, blinded by heathenism,
offered food to idols" (1975, 120). He attended a missionary
school, not surprisingly, since his father was one of the first converts
in the area (Ezenwa-Ohaeto 1997, 3), and, as a Christian, learned to
look down on "heathens" and their pagan customs: Christians
were regarded as "the people of the church," while heathens
were "the people of nothing" (Achebe 1975, 115). Achebe has
suggested that writing TFA was "an act of atonement" for this
early repudiation of ancestral traditions, offered up by a
"prodigal son" (120). At the same time, he recalls being
fascinated by the traditional customs and rituals taking place in the
village, and even "partaking of heathen festival meals"
unbeknownst to his parents. Thus Achebe's relationship to
traditional Igbo ways is rooted in ambivalence.

Like many African writers of his generation, Achebe received a
colonial education--meaning one calibrated to an English frame of
reference--at both the prestigious secondary school he attended at
Umahia and at the University of Ibadan, where he became well acquainted
with the English literary canon. In an oft-quoted passage, Achebe
reflects on the psychological ramifications of studying colonial
fiction, for a young, black African man:

When I had been younger, I had read these adventure books about the
good white man, you know, wandering into the jungle or into danger,
and the savages were after him. And I would instinctively be on the
side of the white man. You see what fiction can do, it can put you on
the wrong side if you are not developed enough. In the university I
suddenly saw that these books had to be read in a different light.
Reading Heart of Darkness, for instance,... I realized that I was one
of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of
enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a
different story. (Qtd. in Flowers 1989, 343)

This sudden shift in readerly identification is a kind of parable
of the fracturing of identity under colonization: Achebe is split
between identifying with the white adventurer and with the savage, and
though he consciously decides to take up the "savage's"
cause, to tell "a different story," his experience suggests
that ultimately it is not as simple as choosing sides. Achebe remains a
divided subject: "living between two worlds," he affirms,
"is one of the central themes of my life and work" (Qtd. in
Flowers 1989, 333).

The pervasive rhetoric of insiderness associated with this writer
obscures the more apt trope of the artist situated at cultural
crossroads. Achebe has referred to his position straddling cultures as
one of the "major advantages" he has enjoyed as a writer
(Okpewho 2003, 72): as Simon Gikandi notes, the Nigerian novelist
learned to regard "the chasm between himself and the Igbo
traditions" as a generative artistic space (1996, 15).
Gikandi's word "chasm" denotes Achebe's alienation
from indigenous customs. Yet I would stress that it is distance (a
"chasm") in tension with proximity to traditional ways that is
the enabling condition for Achebe's art. In this way, he resembles
the figure of the modern fieldworker in the tradition of Bronislaw
Malinowski, whose methodology of participant-observation involves
shuttling back and forth between perspectives--adopting the
native's point of view as a participant, and then pulling back, as
an observer, to place customs and beliefs in context (Clifford 1988,
34). Exploring these affinities in greater detail will shed light on the
intricacies of Achebe's narrative technique.

A Participant-Observer

Mindful of the tendency to read Achebe's works in an
ethnographic mode, one interviewer asked the author whether he regarded
his novels as "a competent source of cultural information ... about
Igbo society"; Achebe concurred, explaining that he aimed to
present "a total world and a total life as it is lived in that
world," and adding, "If somebody else thinks, as some do, that
this is sociology or anthropology, that's their own lookout"
(Flowers 1989, 64). That Achebe is far from discouraging ethnographic
readings of his fiction follows from his pedagogical view of art: to
Achebe, the novelist is a teacher, and educating Africans and foreigners
about a heritage that has been demeaned and eroded through colonization
is a viable way of fulfilling an important social mission. (13)

The phrase Achebe uses to describe the purview of his novels
("a total world and a total life") resonates with the language
of cultural holism employed by anthropologists like Malinowski to
describe their object of study--typically, a tribal village prior to
extensive contact with foreigners. (14) In another interview, Achebe
states that while some African writers may object that Africans are
"not tribal anymore," "My world--the one that interests
me more than any other--is the world of the village" (Flowers
1989,77). In its scope and orientation, TFA resembles the traditional
village study of an anthropologist, except Achebe's
"field" is both home and strange (or, rather, estranged). In
aiming to capture what he perceives as a vanishing way of life (he
speaks of observing "the remains" of village traditions in his
youth [1975, 18]), Achebe also resembles the figure of the modern
fieldworker, bent on what James Clifford has called a project of
"ethnographic salvage." (15) In Achebe's case, the travel
that is also a condition of conventional fieldwork is figurative: the
village he "visits" and recreates in his historical fiction is
one of the past, from which he is separated by time, education, and
experience.

The fieldwork methods associated with British Social Anthropology
and pioneered in the first decades of the twentieth century required the
fieldworker to develop a close rapport with the natives and to take part
in native customs and rituals, as well as to observe them. Referring to
the fieldworker's oscillation between empathic identification and
objective analysis, Clifford writes that participant-observation entails
"a delicate management of distance and proximity" (1997, 72).
The narrative voice of Achebe's first novels has been described in
terms that resonate with these: Okpewho asserts that the "most
striking quality" of TFA is "its empathic account of the Igbo
society," a perspective inexplicably mitigated, in his
characterization, by the "objective distance" of the narrative
voice (25). Similarly Carroll lauds the opening of the sequel to TFA,
Arrow of God, as "an extraordinary achievement of sympathy and
detachment" (1980, 183). These critics fail to recognize--or at
least to explore the ramifications of--the near paradox of this
description, which makes the narrative voice of TFA more interesting
than many acknowledge. Like the traditional anthropologist, this African
novelist navigates between poles of empathy and objectivity, attitudes
that are potentially at odds with one another. Achebe's account of
his relationship to Igbo traditions illustrates this tension:

I was brought up in a village where the old ways were still active and
alive, so I could see the remains of our tradition actually operating.
At the same time I brought a certain amount of detachment to it too,
because my father was a Christian missionary, and we were not fully
part of the "heathen" life of the village. (Achebe 1973, 18)

Achebe is at once the insider, speaking of "our
tradition," and the outside observer, regarding village ways with a
certain "detachment."

Rather than compromising his authority as a representative of Igbo
culture, though, distance emerges in Achebe's account as the
necessary condition for representation:

I think it was easier for me to observe. Many of my contemporaries who
went to school with me and came from heathen families ask me today:
"How did you manage to know all these things?" You see, for them these
old ways were just part of life. I could look at them from a certain
distance, and I was struck by them. (Achebe 1973, 18)

Achebe implies that his "heathen contemporaries"
can't see the cultural forest for the trees: too close to their own
customs, they fail to see them clearly. Malinowski also insinuates that
cultural insiders suffer a kind of conceptual myopia in relation to
their own culture: in his words, "The natives obey the forces and
commands of the tribal code, but they do not comprehend them"
(1984, 11). Whereas Malinowski infantilizes the natives in this
statement, implying they are incapable of comprehending abstraction,
Achebe expresses a similar sentiment without condescension: his unique
perspective, he implies, is a factor of an inherited position. In
Achebe's assessment, the distance imposed between him and the old
ways "by the accident" of his birth is an asset: "The
distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together like the
necessary backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to
see a canvas steadily and fully" (1975, 120). (16) The aesthetic
analogy transforms Achebe into that "judicious viewer," able
to comprehend the canvas of Igbo culture more fully than the
participants whose proximity prevents them from making sense of the
details. Achebe may overstate the fortuitousness of his position: the
simile also reminds us that Achebe is an artist, as well as an
intellectual, and, as such, is by (self-)training and inclination a
self-conscious observer.

While Achebe freely acknowledges his partial disconnection from
traditional ways, at the same time, he promotes an image of himself as
an intimate observer, who has "largely picked up" his
knowledge of indigenous culture through conversation and personal
observation--that is, through firsthand experiences (Achebe qtd. by
Wren, 16-17). This characterization is somewhat misleading: as Gikandi
cautions, "however appealing" the temptation to read Achebe as
"an authentic voice" of his people might be, "it must be
resisted because it is not possible for the writer to appeal to an
original notion of Igbo culture.... Igbo reality, insofar as it is
available to Achebe, comes to him (and hence to the reader) mediated by
the novelist's sources, both Igbo and colonial" (1991, 31). We
know, for example, that Achebe studied West African religion with
Geoffrey Parrinder at University (Ezenwa-Ohaeto 1997, 42-44), and that
he read the works of P. Amaury Talbot, the administrator-anthropologist,
and of G.T. Basden, the missionary-anthropologist on whom the character
Mr. Brown is based; Robert Wren suggests that Achebe's fiction is
informed by this reading (1980, 17-18). In effacing the textual sources
that inform his understanding of native life, Achebe again resembles the
self-mythologizing fieldworker of the early twentieth-century, who
purportedly comes to know a culture through close identification and
empirical observation, not through scholarly research (see Clifford
1997).

Finally, as an African novelist writing in English, Achebe, like
the traditional anthropologist, confronts the challenge of rendering
indigenous experience in a foreign tongue. The non-native reader of TFA
is reminded of the act of translation that lies behind the entire work
each time she stumbles over an untranslated Igbo word. In the Preface to
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski stipulates that
ethnographers should incorporate native phrases into their texts as a
means of establishing authority, by demonstrating their supposed mastery
of the indigenous language (1984, 23). With shifted emphasis, Kortenaar
observes of the Igbo words that pepper Achebe's narrative,
"These foreign traces in an English text refer metonymically to a
whole world that cannot be adequately translated, a world that Achebe
implicitly shares with the characters he writes about. The non-Igbo
reader, by implication, can only achieve a mediated knowledge of that
world" (Kortenaar 2003, 127). I would suggest that, like all
cultural knowledge, Achebe's is also mediated in ways I have
mentioned, though certainly he possesses what might be called a
"fluency" in Igbo culture, and thus--even as his
"world" is not identical to theirs--shares a great deal with
the characters he represents. In my reading, rather than functioning to
reinforce an "us" vs. "you" divide for the non-Igbo
reader, the native phrases woven into the largely English text of TFA
serve to linguistically render the borderland from which Achebe writes.
(17)

In an essay exploring the concept of anthropology as cultural
translation, Talal Asad asserts that the skilled translator, whether of
languages in a limited sense or of cultures more generally, "seeks
to reproduce the structure of an alien discourse within the
translator's own language" (1986, 156). For Achebe, the
situation approximates the reverse: he has argued that "The African
writer ... should aim at fashioning an English which is at once
universal and able to carry his peculiar experience" (1975, 100).
As several critics have argued, Achebe indigenizes the English language,
reproducing attributes of African oral tradition in a written text. (18)
Reversing Asad's formula for traditional translation, one could say
that Achebe "seeks to reproduce the structure of native discourse
within an alien language"; yet for a writer who has described
himself as "perfectly bilingual" (119) and who has written
eloquently about his alienation from ancestral traditions, the
native/alien binary does not quite hold.

Hence, though I have suggested that Achebe's position
vis-a-vis the Igbo has much in common with that of a traditional
anthropologist--similarities the insider/outsider dichotomy would
obscure--important differences mark his position as well. Unlike
Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders, Achebe is not a stranger
pitching his tent among natives; he is a native son, albeit a prodigal one. The stakes are also very different for Achebe than for the
traditional anthropologist: he attempts to "salvage" a
"vanishing" culture not out of disinterested intellectual
curiosity or the necessity of establishing professional credentials (via
the disciplinary rite-of-passage, fieldwork), but rather, as a cultural
nationalist interested in recuperating a culture fragmented and maligned by colonization.

In many ways, then, a more apt analogy for this African novelist at
cultural crossroads is the native anthropologist, who complicates the
inside/outside binary that governs characterizations of conventional
fieldwork. Like the postcolonial writer, the native anthropologist is
liable to be read uncritically as offering an "authentic
perspective," a reading that has recently met with criticism from
within the discipline. Kirin Narayan, a fieldworker and scholar who
uncomfortably bears the label in question, rejects the native/non-native
binary, suggesting that, instead, we should "view each
anthropologist in terms of shifting identifications amid a field of
interpenetrating communities and power relations" (1993, 671).
Considering such factors as "education, gender, sexual orientation,
class, race, or sheer duration of contact," she points out that the
"loci along which we are aligned with or set apart from those whom
we study are multiple and in flux." In this way, her work urges a
rethinking of the relationship between cultural observers and those they
observe, casting serious doubt on "the extent to which anyone is an
authentic insider" (671). Raised in Bombay by a German-American
mother and Indian father, educated in a university in the United States,
and conducting fieldwork in diverse regions in India, Narryan's own
situation amply demonstrates the multiple and shifting identifications
she describes.

Achebe's relationship to the Igbo parallels the complex
positioning of the native anthropologist vis-a-vis her native
informants, which scholars such as Narayan and Clifford suggest overlaps
in significant ways with that of a traditional anthropologist. As if
with Achebe in mind, Clifford writes, "Going 'out' to the
field now sometimes means going 'back,' the ethnography
becoming a 'notebook of a return to the native land'"
(1997, 80). Like Narayan, Clifford stresses that
"'native' researchers are complexly and multiply located
vis-a-vis their worksites and interlocutors," experiencing
"different degrees of affiliation and distance" (77). He also
challenges the inside/outside binary, pointing toward a continuum model,
where cultural observers move fluidly between poles of sympathetic
identification and critical explication in relation to those they study:
for "even when the ethnographer is positioned as an insider, a
'native' in her or his community, some taking of distance and
translating differences will be part of the research, analysis, and
writing" (86). Clifford suggests that for the "native
researcher" as well as the traditional anthropologist, distance and
translation are preconditions of ethnographic representation. As the
next section argues, the narrative voice of TFA manifests the varying
"degrees of affiliation and distance," which typify the
dynamic relationship of all cultural observers to the field, but which
is intensified in the case of the native anthropologist.

Things Fall Apart: A Dialectic of Proximity and Distance

Part I of Achebe's first novel plunges the non-native reader
into the world of the Igbo, with detailed descriptions of the
people's customs, beliefs, and ceremonies. Seamlessly woven into
the narrative fabric are accounts of the Feast of the New Yam, the
negotiation of bride price, the ceremony of the egwugwu (ancestral
spirits), the nso-ani (sacrilege) of committing violence during the Week
of Peace, and so on; these details, together with the numerous proverbs
embodying clan wisdom that punctuate the narrative, (19) function
collectively to create a rich, vivid portrait of a traditional Nigerian
culture. The narrator's intimate acquaintance with Igbo culture is
signaled by the ability to closely document such beliefs and practices,
to use the native tongue, and to omnisciently enter into Igbo
characters' minds.

Not surprisingly, then, critics have interpreted the narrative
voice as emanating "from the inside." In Carroll's
estimation, "The voice is that of a wise and sympathetic elder of
the tribe" (1980, 31). Innes also stresses the speaker's
identification with the natives' point of view: "the narrative
voice is primarily a recreation of the persona which is heard in tales,
history, proverbs and poetry belonging to an oral tradition; it
represents a collective voice through which the artist speaks for his
society, not as an individual apart from it--he is the chorus rather
than the hero" (1990,32). Recently, Angela F. Miri has echoed these
readings, asserting that TFA's "storyteller undoubtedly
represents the Igbo voice or the vox populi" (2004, 102). Whether
the voice is individuated (a tribal elder) or collective (a communal
chorus), critics persist in casting Achebe and the narrator in the role
of native informant for the Western reader.

Yet assertions like Innes's that the narrator "speaks for
his society, not as an individual apart from it" will not withstand
close reading: the narrator frequently stands apart, becoming (in my
terms) an observer, rather than an implied participant. We are told, for
example, that "Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even
the bravest among them. Children were warned not to whistle at night for
fear of evil spirits" (Achebe 1996, 7; my emphasis). These remarks
clearly install distance between the narrator--who presumably is not
afraid of the dark, and likely does not believe in evil spirits--and
"these people," who are cowed by their fear of the night. Here
the narrator is aligned more closely with non-native readers than with
the Igbo perspective, and, in this mediating role, is more ethnographic
observer than native informant. The move is akin to what James Buzard
has called the "self-interrupting style" of ethnographic
narratives, whereby the ethnographer insists that however closely s/he
may identify with the natives, s/he is not really one of them (2005,
34).

For the most part, pinning down the narrative perspective is not a
case of discerning whether the narrator is inside or outside native
culture, but, rather, of detecting the fluid movement between these
vantage points. The slipperiness of the narrative voice is evident in a
passage that begins, "Umuofia was feared by all its neighbours. It
was powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine-men were
feared in all the surrounding country" (Achebe 1996, 8). That
Umuofia is "powerful in magic" is presented in a declarative
sentence that renders without question or judgment the native point of
view. The narrator continues, "on one point there was general
agreement--the active principle in that medicine had been an old woman
with one leg. In fact, the medicine itself was called agadi-nwayi, or
old woman" (8-9). This story of the origin of native belief is
flagged as consistent with the clan world view: they agree that the old
woman with one leg is the source of their reputation in magic. At the
same time, the anecdote is consonant with anthropological accounts of
primitive cultures that regard disability as a source of metaphysical
power. Thus the narrator subtly provides an alternate frame of
reference--a way of understanding Umuofia's reputation that accords
with Western disbelief in magic. Rather than operating from a fixed
viewpoint, the narrator moves freely between divergent perspectives.

Another passage that illustrates the narrative's liminal perspective--jockeying between inside and outside perspectives in
ethnographic fashion--is the description of the Oracle, Agbala, in
Chapter Three:

No one had ever beheld Agbala, except his priestess.... It was said
that when such a spirit appeared, the man saw it vaguely in the
darkness, but never heard its voice. Some people even said that they
had heard the spirits flying and flapping their wings against the roof
of the cave. (Achebe 1996, 12)

The passage is respectful of the Oracle's sacredness to the
Igbo: the narrator does not overtly proclaim disbelief. Yet the
existence of Agbala is left in question: no one has seen it, except in
dubious conditions ("vaguely in the darkness") and no one has
"heard its voice." Indeed, what can be heard in the cave--the
"flapping of wings"--above all conjures the image of bats, the
probable denizens of a dark, dank place. Hence, again, the narrator
subtly provides an alternative frame of reference, accommodating
skepticism alongside Igbo belief.

The very few critics who avoid the reductive insider reading of TFA
tend to equate the intermittent distance of the narrative to which I
have been alluding with an anthropological perspective. For instance,
Gikandi observes that the narrator at times "adopts distance and
represents the Igbo as if they were an anthropological
'other'" (1996, 46). Similarly, Koretenaar notes that
Achebe occasionally "lapses into the knowing tone of the
anthropologist" (2003, 132), as in the glossary, when he defines
several Igbo terms with "thoroughgoing disbelief." (20) While
usefully complicating naive ethnographic readings that fail to
problematize the narrator's insiderness, these critics operate from
an equally fallacious assumption that an anthropological perspective is
inherently alienated. In doing so, they fail to realize that the
anthropological perspective itself mediates between near and far, inside
and outside, distance and proximity. They conflate distance and
disbelief with the alien perspective of an anthropologist, rather than
recognizing that the anthropological voice mediates between ostensible
native and foreign perspectives--alternately suspending disbelief, to
closely identify with a native perspective, and explicating belief, from
an external vantage point.

This is more than a question of semantics. By reading the
narration's often overlooked complexity as ethnographic, I hope not
only to underscore the novel's artistry, but also to usefully
complicate our understanding of ethnographic relationships themselves.
When Achebe's best critics reverse the more common "naive
ethnographic reading" that I've been discussing by equating
the novel's anthropological perspective with "a view from
outside," they unwittingly replicate the kind of dichotomous thinking Achebe himself so assiduously avoids in his nuanced narrative.
On a stylistic level, the slippery narrative voice manifests the ongoing
process of positioning and repositioning oneself at cultural crossroads.

Acknowledging inconsistencies in perspective that most Achebe
critics ignore, Gikandi argues that the ambivalent narrative voice
signals contradictions inherent within Igbo culture, contradictions
highlighted by the character of Nwoye, who functions as an internal
critic of such practices as the disposing of twins and the killing of
Ikemefuna. For Gikandi, it is erroneous to read the narrator as either a
representative insider or a unified, collective voice because a stable
field of social values doesn't exist in the novel: pre-colonial
Umuofia is represented as "a society with various voices and
conflicting interests" (1996, 45). While taking Gikandi's
point, I would stress that the fluctuations of the narrative voice also
express the shifting affiliations of the author, who, like the native
anthropologist, is pulled between the values and traditions of sometimes
conflicting cultural frameworks.

Another notable exception to the reductive insider reading is that
of Abdul JanMohamed, who interprets the novel's balancing act
between sympathy and objective distance--or, in his terms, between
"sacred" and "secular" perspectives--as narrative
"double consciousness." JanMohamed conceives of this dualism
as the author's creative solution to a dilemma he describes in this
way:Achebe is "challenged with the unenviable task of ensuring that
his characters do not seem foolish because they believe in the absence
of [the] border [between the sacred and the secular], while he is
obliged to acknowledge it for the same reason"; "double
consciousness," then, is the simultaneous "awareness of the
border and its deep repression" (1984, 32-33). Rather than serving
to pander to a Western audience who will regard native belief with
possible disdain (by regarding the characters as "foolish"), I
have argued that the narrative tension between belief and skepticism
registers the author's own shifting frame of reference, one akin to
that of an ethnographic observer, continually navigating between
indigenous and foreign viewpoints. Moreover, in its maneuverings among
different Igbo as well as Western perspectives, the narrative
consciousness that emerges is more than double; it has multiple,
shifting permutations, as a final example will show.

Illustrating the narrative's ever-shifting vantage point is
Chapter Ten's description of the trial, presided over by nine
egwugwu (masked ancestral spirits) and their leader, the "Evil
Forest." (21) To begin with, conjuring the momentousness of the
ceremony, the egwugwu are deemed "the most powerful and the most
secret cult in the clan" (Achebe 1996, 63); their voices are
represented as "guttural and awesome" (62). The description
continues, throwing the reader into the center of the action: "The
egwugwu house was now a pandemonium of quavering voices: Aru oyim de de
de de dei! Filled the air as the spirits of the ancestors, just emerged
from the earth, greeted themselves in their esoteric language"
(62-63). From the vantage point of the believer, the voices are
presented as those of the ancestral spirits. The Igbo greeting remains
untranslated, such that the narrator serves as the custodian of
knowledge unshared with the reader. Yet the word "esoteric"
signals that members of the clan also remain in the dark as to the
significance of the utterance: "No woman ever asked questions"
about the exclusively male cult (63). From a position of privileged
omniscience, then, the narrator moves not only between an inside and an
outside perspective, but also between the semi-opaque boundaries that
divide the male and female spheres. This narrative flexibility resembles
the shifting field relationships of the native anthropologist, as
described by Narayan, with points of affiliation and disaffiliation that
are "multiple and in flux" (Narayan 671).

It is only after building up a sense of the ceremony's
significance from a point of view identified with the initiate that the
narrator steps back from the event to give another perspective:

Okonkwo's wives, and perhaps other women as well might have noticed
that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo. And they
might also have noticed that Okonkwo was not among the titled men and
elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu. But if they thought these
things they kept them within themselves. The egwugwu with the springy
walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan. (Achebe 1996, 64)

The passage begins by subtly casting doubt on the native belief in
ancestral spirits--unmasking the egwugwu, as it were--by intimating that
one of them has "the springy walk of Okonkwo," and thus is a
man, not a spirit. The narrative voice draws the female characters into
complicity with its skeptical perspective, by tentatively attributing to
them a glimmering awareness of Okonkwo's telltale walk; they
"might have noticed" what the narrator knows for certain:
there is a human being beneath the ceremonial disguise. If Wren is
correct when he asserts that the Igbo perceive the egwugwu not as
"mortals masked but [as] transcendent--even
transubstantiate--beings, living presences of the dead fathers of the
nine villages of Umuofia" (Achebe 1996, 35), then calling attention
to Okonkwo's disguise represents a major breach with the
insider's view. An episode toward the end of the novel lends
support for this reading: when Enoch publicly unmasks an egwugwu,
"reduc[ing] its immortal prestige in the eyes of the
uninitiated," he is represented as "killing ... an ancestral
spirit," thereby throwing Umofia into a state of
"confusion," and effectively presaging the "death"
of the "soul of the tribe" (131-32). The language literalizes
the belief that the egwugwu embody the spirits of the clan, as does the
closing sentence of the passage quoted above, which rejoins the
perspective of the devout believer, by affirming that the egwugwu in
question actually "was one of the dead fathers of the clan."
Thus the narrator inhabits shifting and sometimes contradictory
perspectives, along a continuum that stretches from the most credulous believer to the skeptic or cultural outsider.

Through these maneuverings, the narrative voice replicates the
dynamic positioning of the native anthropologist--at once part of Igbo
culture and apart from it, a participant and a judicious observer, at
turns closely identifying with various Igbo perspectives and
"taking the distance" that is the precondition for
ethnographic representation.

Conclusion

It is tempting to read TFA as a voice from the inside for a number
of reasons. The novel itself encourages this reading, with its detailed
documentation of cultural practices, its fluid incorporation of native
words and phrases, and its juxtaposition of the principal narrative
perspective with the reductive and distorted view of outsiders like the
District Commissioner. By construing his narrative as combating the
misinformed representations of colonial writers, Achebe has contributed
to the impression of the book's documentary realism.

Additionally, like other postcolonial literature, TFA has entered
the Western canon as a kind of sequel to British Modernism, one that is
perceived as providing a corrective to the ideological blind-spots of
writers from the earlier historical period. Frequently partnered with
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in introductory level courses and
British literature surveys (including my own), TFA appears on the
syllabus to show the "other side" of the colonial encounter.
Too often this impulse leads critics and teachers to regard postcolonial
writers as rendering the experience of colonized and pre-colonial
societies in an unproblematic, unmediated way.

Yet this mode of reading oversimplifies the relationship between
Achebe and traditional Igbo culture, threatening to fetishize the voice
of the former colonial subject, while ignoring the complexity of the
narrative voice, which is more dynamic than such readings acknowledge.
Dubbing the novel ethnographic or anthropological is equally reductive,
when these terms are understood to imply a kind of photographic realism,
and when the author's indigenous status is assumed to vouch for an
uncomplicated textual authenticity. The opposing, but still misguided,
assumption that the novel's anthropological perspective is
inherently alienated likewise simplifies the dynamic ethnographic
relationship, which the novel subtly reproduces at the level of style.

Notwithstanding these cautions, I believe that literature is one of
the most valuable tools we possess for imagining life in other cultures.
Thus we should not stop reading ethnographically, but rather, by
appreciating the complexity of the ethnographic project, especially when
undertaken by a "native son," we can better appreciate the
corresponding complexities of narratives that emerge from cultural
crossroads.

Notes

(1) In Morning Yet on Creation Day, Achebe terms this voice the
"sedate prose of the district-officer-government
anthropologist" of the early twentieth-century (1975, 5).

(2) In the sequel to TFA, Arrow of God, we learn that the
Commissioner has profited from colonial anthropology, since his book has
"become a colonial classic, a manual of empire-building," as
Nahem Yousaf notes (2003, 39).

(3) The phrase is not Achebe's, but rather an allusion to the
well-known and seminal work of postcolonial criticism, The Empire Writes
Back (1989).

(4) According to Isidore Okpewho, as of 2003, the novel had been
translated into nearly sixty languages and sold close to nine million
copies. Charles Larson states that following Nigerian independence, TFA
became required reading at the secondary level in Nigeria (Okpewho 2003,
27), but my focus in this essay is primarily the novel's critical
reception in the U.S.

(5) Hassoldt Davis, Saturday Review, 1959 (qtd in Larson 15-16).

(6) Other respondents to the survey stated that they wanted to
"give students a sense of African history and the effects of
colonialism on Africa, as well as to dispel stereotypes about
Africa," and many stressed that the novel provides an accessible,
evocative introduction to African literature or to post-colonial
literature more generally (Lindfors 1991, 15).

(7) I employ "authoritative" as a relative, not an
absolute, term, by which I mean "well informed.". The
authority I would ascribe to TFA--as to any well-founded historical
and/or ethnographic representation--is that of what James Clifford calls
a "partial construction" and what Donna Harraway calls
"situated knowledge."

(8) See, for example Eleni Coundouriotis, who has demonstrated that
African novels frequently have been read (by Africans as well as
Europeans and North Americans) as bearing ethnographic witness to their
authors' cultures, such that their historical specificity is muted
or erased (1999, 4-5). Elizabeth Jane Harrison identifies a similar
tendency in scholarship on the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston and Mary
Hunter Austin whose "literary strategies" have been neglected
"in favor of an analysis of the cultural context of their
narratives" (1997, 44). Likewise, Henry Louis Gates complains that
European and American critics too often appropriate African and
African-American literature as "anthropological evidence"
about these cultures (1984, 4).

(9) Booker, The African Novel in English (1998, 65). As early as
1969, G. D. Killam makes an almost equivalent statement: "So much
has been written about the anthropological and sociological significance
of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God--their evocation of traditional
nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century Ibo village life-- ... that
the overall excellence of these books as pieces of fiction, as works of
art, has been obscured" (Booker 1998, 1).

(10) Pointing out that Achebe's fellow Nigerian writer, Wole
Soyinka, has labeled Achebe a "chronicler" of the past, Nahem
Yousaf similarly objects that Achebe's fiction has been assessed in
too limiting terms, "according to its verisimilitude, its facility
for reflecting external reality" (2003, 4).

(11) Since the publication of James Clifford and George
Marcus's Writing Culture (1986), there has been general
acknowledgement within the field of anthropology that the classic genre
associated with fieldwork, the ethnography, is a text--that the
experience of fieldwork is mediated by language which shapes/constructs
that experience.

(12) I am using meta in the sense connoted by the term metafiction,
meaning fiction that self-consciously alludes to its own artificiality
or literariness, announcing, in effect, "I am fiction." To
read meta-ethnographically, by extension, means to read in a way that is
self-reflexive of ethnographic practice, attentive to the dynamism
inherent in the ethnographic voice.

(13) See "The Novelist as Teacher" (Achebe 1975, 67-73).

(14) Cultural holism in British Social Anthropology has its roots
in the discipline's first text book, E. B. Tylor's 1871
Primitive Culture, which defined culture as a "complex whole."
Primitive villages, believed to be isolated from outside contact,
organically integrated, and relatively simple in their organization,
were regarded as ideal "laboratories" for studying culture
(see for example Mead 2001, 6). However, the idea of the pristine native
village has been critiqued in recent years as a romantic construct: for
example, Arjun Appadurai writes, "Natives, people confined to and
by the places to which they belong, groups unsullied by contact with a
larger world, have probably never existed" (1988, 39). See also
Clifford (1997).

(15) Cf. Coundouriotos, who argues that "unlike the
'salvage ethnography' of European ethnographers who sought, as
Clifford has explained, to preserve what was already lost, Achebe's
authoethnography aims at affirming the contemporaneity of native
cultures with those of the West" (1999, 38).

(16) Ruth Benedict also employs an aesthetic metaphor in discussing
the anthropologist's unique perspective: for Benedict, a kind of
"gestalt" vision enables the cultural observer to make sense
of a foreign culture, such that "hundreds of details fall into
over-all patterns" (1946, 12). "Pattern" becomes an
operative trope for Benedict, evident in the title of her 1934
anthropological classic, Patterns of Culture. For an analysis of the
relationship between Benedict's concept of culture and the approach
to art of literary studies' New Critics (both seeking organic unity
and a complex whole in their objects of study), see Manganaro (2002,
151-74).

(17) The allusion is to Gloria Andzaldua's innovative and
powerful textualization of bi-lingual, bi-cultural experience in
Borderland/La Frontiera, which poetically theorizes the experience of
literally and symbolically inhabiting the borderland between Mexico and
Texas, from a Chicana perspective.

(18) See JanMohammed (1984), Kortenaar (2003), Booker (1998).

(19) By conjuring the effect of language in translation, the
novel's proverbs evoke the semblance of cultural authenticity, yet
ironically, it has been well established that these proverbs at best
loosely approximate Igbo sayings, and in some cases are Achebe's
pure invention. See Shelton (1969, 86-87).

(20) See footnote 21.

(21) Even the definition of egwugwu in the book's glossary
reveals a shifting relationship to Igbo culture: prior to the 1996
edition, the term was glossed as "a masquerader who impersonates
one of the ancestral spirits of the village" (Achebe 1996, 149)--a
definition that reflects "thoroughgoing disbelief," as
Kortenaar notes (2003, 130). The most recent edition of the text revises
this definition to "the masked spirit, representing the ancestral
spirits of the village" (liii)--wording that presumably more
closely aligns with the Igbo perspective.

Asad, Talal. 1986. "The Concept of Cultural Translation in
British Social Anthropology." In Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword; Patterns of
Japanese Culture. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

Stocking, Jr., George W. 1983. "The Ethnographer's Magic:
Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski." In
Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. Milwaukee:
University Wisconsin Press.

Carey Snyder is associate professor of English at Ohio University.
She is the author of British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters:
Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf (2008), and has published
articles in Modern Fiction Studies and Woolf Studies Annual.

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